Development blog for a space exploration roguelike game

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How players turns into commiters

Today, you will hear a dev-log not from the developing team, but from one of the players, that have helped us with the code.

Some time ago, I had nothing to do at the evening and had spent it watching videos on Blacksilverufa’s (Russian let’s-player) Youtube-channel. And I had stambled upon the Let’s Play of AuroraRL. The game got me interested, and after some researching, I’ve found out that the project is opensource, and I can participate in it. So, I’ve downloaded the sources, opened bugtracker and that’s how it’s all started. I’m not a professional programmer – it’s a hobby for me. And opensource project is a great way to practice.

Egor(our lead programmer) pitches me some work from time to time, and gives me advices how to do it the right way.

Most difficult part of working with Aurora, probably – bug tracking. Some bugs just don’t show anywhere outsid the game itself, and it’s hard to recreate them. F.e., there is a bug with HP level of the enemies. It’s all clear in the game logs, and hard to track the problem, because the bug is very rare. I haven’t got to this yet – and the bug itself is not the primary concern right now, but I feel that it may take me lot’s of hours to do so.

Working on game’s features is more fun, though. For example, respawn of the planetary monsters or inability to pick the loot, if your inventory is full wasn’t very hard to do – it took me just 2 attemts. First attemt was ruined by overcomplicated code, so I’ve fix it following the advices of Egor. So, in the end, working on this project is a lot of fun and it’s a very good learning expirience.

And we are reminding you that our sources is open. If you have a knowledge of progremming, and you are willing to help us fix some bugs or make an interesting feature(your own or the one that we are already have in our tracker) – you are completly welcomed! You can do a frok, apply the changes, send the pull-request – and all of this will help us make our project better.